Ka Mate!
We’re going to die.

On night patrols
Hold your
7.62 mm
Semi Automatic
Partner close
Slow dance
To a sexy
‘Waltz’.

Dawn arrives
Broken by a grenade’s
Spoon popping.
Music hits a high note
We dash the distance
While shrapnel shreds
To a fast and furious
'Freak dance'.

Nine months later
And dozens of surgeries
The survivor returns
To finish Chubby Checker’s
‘Twist’.

A night ambush ends in
‘Swan Lake Ballet’
At three in the morning
Blasting the snorting beast
With a fifty caliber
Browning Automatic Rifle,
The black swan’s death rattle.

Listen
To the entertaining
Witch, Hanoi Hanna.
As she does a
‘Solo tap dance’
Warning moms,
Sisters;
Lovers
That death reaches
By trick or treat.
She calls
Names;
Units;
Locations.
It’s a bloody game of bingo
Waiting for the lightning strike;
The sniper’s round;
The grim reaper.

One man loses his head
To a rocket
No more ‘salsa’ for him.
That was his last
‘Dirty dance’.

All we found of the short-timer
That drove over an
Improvised explosive
Was his foot.
The ‘hula’ says hello,
Goodbye.

With crusty combat coming,
The division
Flips the switch
To start
The ‘rumba’;
A cowboy’s ‘line dance’;
The ‘cancan’;
To make ready for the ‘hoedown’.
To turn Hanna’s words
Into a bloody reversal.

Jellied gasoline,
Delivers crispy critters
By the dozens.
Ninety millimeter
Beehive rounds
Fragment hundreds.
South Korean Tigers
Skin snipers;
Burn villages
Dancing the ‘flamenco’
Among the flames
While Puff the Magic Dragon
Sounds like a vacuum cleaner
Raining death
At six thousand rounds a minute
Stripping trees.

Flares mimic the ‘minuet’
Above an inferno
of friendly fire,
Dots and dashes of light
Welcome you home
To a possibility of
Oblivion or
Rival bunker rats.

Motorized Artillery
Sends an unexpected surprise
Into the highlands
Thirty miles away.
Lighting the night;
Shaking the earth
Setting off alarms
Inside your head
To a ‘Texas two-step’.

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder
Means sleeping with knives.
I’d rather listen to Jazz
And forget about dancing.

Who’s ready for
The last ‘tango’?

Ka Ora!
We’re going to live.

The Soulful Veteran
a veteran's blog